Analyzing the Urgency of the Right of “shufʿa” in Shīʿa and Sunnī Jurisprudence

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

• Mahdi Movahedi Moheb ¹
• Hasan Pourlotfollah ²

¹ Associate Professor, Department of Law, Faculty of Humanities, Semnan University, Semnan, Iran

² PhD Graduate, Department of Jurisprudence and Foundations of Law, Faculty of Humanities, Semnan University, Semnan, Iran

10.22067/jfiqh.2023.76846.1473

Abstract

The urgency of retaining the right of Shufʿa is disputed in Islamic jurisprudence. prominent Imāmī jurisconsults and the majority of Sunnī jurisconsults consider that unjustified delay in exercising the right of Shufʿa leads to the abdication of this right. Contrastively, there is the viewpoint of absolutely no time limited, which holds that the right of Shufʿa is effective until it is relinquished. This view has prominent advocates among Shīʿa and Sunnī. Another group of scholars exclusively believe in the urgency of this right and a group has come to a failure in combining opinions. The preferred view accepts the evidence supporting the temporal expansiveness of the right of Shufʿa, but leaves the determination of its limits to custom and traditional practice. This means that if some time passes from the initial moment of entitlement that customarily and traditionally indicates the Shafīʿ does not intend to claim their right of Shufʿa, their right is lost. The present study employes the descriptive-analytical method and analyzes and critiques the existing views and opinions. In the end, the aforementioned opinion based on evidence and indications is considered defensible, and the famous opinion of considering urgency for the right of Shufʿa (which has entered the Civil Code as well, as Article 821) is deemed flawed from several aspects. The selected view considers customary practice (ʿurf) to be the criteria for the ending of the period in which the right can be exercised (similar to the widely accepted opinion), according to the selected view the default assumption is the continuation of the right of Shufʿa. However, it is the buyer’s responsibility to prove its invalidation, and the widely accepted opinion holds that after a period of time in which the right can be typically exercised, the right is lost and it’s the Shafīʿ’s responsibility to prove the validity of excuse and continue the right.

Keywords

• Excercizing Shufʿa
• Entitlement to Shufʿa
• The loss of Right
• The share of Mashāʿ
• Shafi
• Urgency of Shufʿa

Main Subjects

• Civil jurisprudence

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©2024 The author(s). This is an open access article distributed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0)

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